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Shift in Stock Options May Be
At Expense of Accounting Purists

By

Nick Wingfield Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Updated July 14, 2003 6:53 p.m. ET

Stock options long have been the compensation expense that the tech world avoided treating as a compensation expense -- relegating the cost to footnotes, bypassing the income statement. Now that Microsoft Corp., with the granddaddy of such compensation programs, has decided to ditch stock options in favor of restricted stock -- which the accounting...